


Fata Morgana

by Aesoleucian



Series: Gertrude Robinson's Extremely Temporary Home for Directionless Young Men [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, arctic expedition! michael backstory!, gertrude "what feelings" robinson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 17:24:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Fata morgana. Something that is where it shouldn’t be. Something that should be there but isn’t.





	Fata Morgana

**Author's Note:**

> Zemlya Sannikova is a real fake island! Yakov Sannikov is believed to have seen a fata morgana mirage on the horizon and taken it for an island. Obviously, it was never found.

Michael has always had a knack for getting into places he shouldn’t. The problem is that for the most part he can only tell where he shouldn’t have been _after_ the fact, when someone is yelling at him for being there. And the Institute is unexpectedly full of places he isn’t supposed to be.

The first one is artefact storage. He reasons that if nobody were allowed in, they couldn’t get the artefacts in, and he _does_ work for the Institute, so it must be fine, right? Also Joanie Harrell bet him five quid he wouldn’t and he’s not rich, you know? He’s not going to turn up his nose at five perfectly good pounds.

Inside artefact storage there’s a bunch of dusty old junk that doesn’t seem to be properly catalogued at all. Looks more like someone’s basement where they keep things they don’t need. Some of them are quite nice, though. Would anyone miss this locket? It looks to be tarnishing like real silver, and—

“Excuse me,” someone says by the door. He jumps and drops the locket.

“Yes, hello?”

“You’re not authorized to be here.”

“I’m really very impressed that you can tell! What with how dark it is and everything. Actually I’m not sure why you didn’t turn on the light, unlike me. Which, well, that’s because… I mean, I’m really sorry, it was a bit of a mistake, I’ve only been sent to look for—”

“Come out of there.”

He slinks toward the door, embarrassed to have been caught. It’s some old lady who’s maybe in charge of artefacts? He’s seen her before but never got her name. As he passes her she shuts the doors with an ominous _boom_ and says, “Did you see anything strange?”

“Not really? I’m honestly not sure why we have all of those. Are they historic?”

“Many of them, yes. Come with me.”

He follows her bemusedly up several flights of stairs, unsure if he’s actually in trouble or not. He starts to properly panic when she knocks on the door with the shiny brass plaque that says ELIAS BOUCHARD. HEAD OF THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE. “Come in,” says Michael’s boss’ boss’ boss. Michael tries to come in without actually coming in. “Ah, Gertrude! And who’s this you’ve brought?”

“He was in artefact storage,” says Gertrude.

“You didn’t even ask him his name?” says Mr. Bouchard. He tuts. Michael didn’t know actually people actually tutted, in real life.

“It’s Michael Shelley. I’m not in trouble, am I? No-one actually told me I wasn’t supposed to go in there, so…”

“You’re not in trouble, Michael. It’s just that artefact storage is a bit classified. It’s really a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but now that you’ve been in there I’ve got to transfer you to the Archives.” He smiles apologetically and slides a contract of some kind across his desk toward Michael. “Not my choice, you understand. The board of trustees can be so strange about some things.”

Michael signs it happily enough, noting as he does that he gets a pay rise of fifty pounds a month. He really shouldn’t tell Joanie about this or everyone from the library will be trying to break into artefact storage next. He _really_ wants to tell her, though. He’s probably going to have to give up the five quid she owes him and pretend he got promoted for a totally unrelated reason. Damn.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Gertrude,” says Mr. Bouchard.

“You get so tetchy if you have to find these things out for yourself. Come on. We’ve both got work to be doing.” Gertrude sweeps out of the room and he trails after her, not really wanting to say anything—good Lord she’s intimidating—but also he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, so…

“Um, excuse me? Ms. Gertrude. What should I, er, do? Now that I work in the Archives?”

She sighs through her nose. “When you come in tomorrow, go to room 043. My assistants have their offices there. To make things perfectly clear, you are not an archival assistant. You are a filing clerk.”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, yes, Ms. Gertrude.”

“It’s Robinson. Now get on with you.”

And so he does. And he starts working as a filing clerk, which is really not much different than being a librarian except that he only gets asks from the archival assistants and not from the general public. And he frequently has to run out and get them coffee. The best part of being a filing clerk is that he can usually wheedle a story or two out of the assistants. Most of their work is research trying to confirm statements about the supernatural, and there are a few they say they haven’t been able to refute. They’re all strange in such a delicious way, not like any of the ghost stories Michael has ever heard before. And he’s even allowed into artefact storage now, if someone’s too lazy to go in for themselves! Joanie is positively green with envy and she _has_ to give him the five quid even though, as she says, he cheated making a bet like that when he knew he was about to be transferred.

“Should have put a time limit then,” he tells her, tucking his new five pound note into his wallet.

 

Michael is naturally curious and naturally observant. For most of his life people have been finding a way to spin this as a negative: he’s nosy, a sneak, a rat. But he likes to look on the bright side, and he’s quite pleased with himself when he finds a secret trapdoor in the basement floor of the Archives. He even coaxes Rashid to come down with him and see what it is. And it’s this bizarre sewer thing! He doesn’t explore very far on the first day because Rashid is a scaredy-cat who’s read too many ghost stories, but eventually he knows the rooms and passages around the entrance very well. It’s a good place to come and smoke, since nobody even seems to know it exists, and he always gets scared someone’s watching him if he smokes behind the building. He’s _not_ getting fired now that he’s got his pay rise.

He does… do kind of a stupid thing, though, the second week: he gets lost in the sewer. It all seems like a good, slightly spooky time until he comes to a staircase. A proper one with stone steps, leading both up and down as far as he can see with his flashlight. That’s when he gets properly scared. He’s read House of Leaves, okay? Well, he had his mate Dave explain the plot to him, which is just as good, and he knows that endless corridors with endless staircases is a bad sign!

When he tells Rashid and Eli about it he makes them promise not to rat him out, and yet the next day when he goes down to the basement he finds a note on the underside of the trapdoor. A pale yellow sticky note, which almost makes it creepier that it says: _Don’t go down there again, Michael. You won’t like what you find when you come back out_. Rashid and Eli swear blind that they didn’t tell anyone, but obviously _someone_ told.

He doesn’t go back down there.

The next month Eli goes on vacation and doesn’t come back. According to Rosie at the front desk he just quit, but he also doesn’t answer his phone when Michael tries to call him about getting goodbye drinks. Not that it’s the first time someone stopped answering calls from Michael, but Eli really didn’t seem the type. Very polite, he was.

Gertrude comes down to the assistants’ office, where Michael quickly pretends he just arrived with his load of files rather than hanging around telling Rashid about a really intense goal his team scored last night. She fixes Michael with a look that makes him feel like she knows every guilty secret he’s ever had. “Since we have a vacancy, you’ve been promoted. Do try to stay where you’re authorized to go this time.”

So. She definitely knows. He swallows hard and nods, and doesn’t let out the breath he was holding until she’s left. “Whew. I thought she was going to kill me. With her laser eyes. Not that I think she can literally shoot lasers out of her eyes, but I won’t say for absolute sure that she can’t? But I feel like she could find another—”

“Michael,” says Rashid. “Shut up. I can’t believe you weren’t just fired. And would you just stop fucking smoking pot at work? How hard is it to wait a couple hours until you get home?” He’s a bit of a narc, isn’t he, but Michael doesn’t hold it against him. He digs around in his desk drawer and slaps down a stack of paper. “Orientation packet. She’ll know if you don’t read it.”

Michael doesn’t doubt it. Gertrude has an air of knowing a lot of things she couldn’t possibly know. He takes the packet and flips to the first page. “D’you think I can call her Gertrude now that I’m a proper assistant?”

“Not to her face,” says Rashid, and he ducks behind his computer screen.

So Michael reads it. It’s mostly a long list of don’ts: don’t ask impertinent questions, don’t bother the archivist unless you actually have something important, don’t read statements out loud, don’t go to statement sites, don’t rearrange files. There are a few do’s on handling research, and a short list of expected duties that Michael already knows because Rashid loves to complain about them.

Being an archival assistant is pretty good overall. He does have to learn how to do research, and he can’t help but think that Gertrude probably should have hired someone with research experience? Like a real librarian? Obviously he’s not going to _complain_ , as he’s finally got a chance to do what he came here for, but it’s still a bit strange, isn’t it?

 

The third place he finds his way into is Gertrude’s office, while she’s out. Lately she’s been going to a lot of conferences and doing a lot of field research. It’s good that Rashid is with her this time, although Michael likes it better when he can make sure himself that she’s all right. She might be energetic but she’s still an old woman, and she gave him a good job when she really didn’t have to so he feels like he owes her. She kind of reminds him of his grandmother, actually, an equally stern old woman who always had chores or errands to make him do and then nitpick the results. But very occasionally she would smile at him and maybe buy him an ice cream or a comic. Gertrude hasn’t smiled at him yet, but he’s optimistic. If he just keeps being helpful in every way he knows how, she’s sure to soften up eventually.

Where was he?

Oh, right, in Gertrude’s office without permission. Just to look around and see… well, if she has something he’s interested in. Not to take, obviously! Just to read. He pokes through some of the file cabinets, and to his surprise they’re exactly as much of a mess as the rest of the Archive. He can’t help but feel that someone as stern as Gertrude should be stern about proper filing, too. Look, here’s a drawer with statements from 1961 to 2005, and they’re not even in order! He checks to make sure they’re not alphabetized or anything, and they’re really not, but his eye does catch on a sticky note on the front of the statement in the file he pulls out. _Buried_ , it says. _cf 0010810—Tanner family_. That’s interesting because he’s never seen a statement with a sticky note. Or a statement with photos and an extra interview. As far as he can tell Gertrude just throws away whatever the assistants write once she’s read it. It makes him feel a little more cheerful that his work actually is going somewhere.

In another one of the cabinets there’s a bunch of letters. He virtuously doesn’t read them because he wants to deserve Gertrude’s trust in leaving her office for him to protect. Then there are all the books on the shelves, a lot of them in French and Latin and some that are probably in English but have titles he can’t pronounce anyway. He leaves them alone. He’s never been one for reading books. Taking care of them, sure, he did work in the library for a year. But thinking of reading a book is pretty intimidating. Michael knows he’s not smart, he’s been told that by every teacher he ever had. Oh! But there’s still something he wants to read.  Something that will finally explain what happened to Ryan, and if the _real_ statements are anywhere they’ve got to be in here—

There’s a knock on the doorframe and he looks around in surprise. “Oh! Mr. Bouchard! Good afternoon!”

“Michael?” says Mr. Bouchard. “I saw the door was open, so I thought I might have been mistaken about Gertrude’s return date. But I don’t believe I was. What are you doing in here?”

“Just looking around,” he says, and then his brain switches tracks from _friendly bloke_ to _boss’ boss_. “I mean, I was in here to deliver a statement she asked for before she left and I thought, er, her books looked interesting.”

“Gertrude never fails to lock her door when she isn’t in,” says Mr. Bouchard.

“Oh, er, is that right?” Michael laughs, embarrassed. He barely even notices when he uses his lockpicks, because as far as he’s concerned it’s standard procedure for opening a door. “Well, I’m sorry about that, then. Maybe she forgot to do it this time? Anyway, I guess I should be going! Sorry for making you think she was in and everything!”

Mr. Bouchard is suddenly in the way of him leaving without actually seeming to move at all, and he stops short. “Michael, I’d like to ask you not to bring lockpicks to work. As I said before, there are certain places in the Archives that will incur a penalty if someone goes there. I don’t want to lose a funding source because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself. Is that clear?”

“Yes! Yes, of course, Mr. Bouchard, I’m so sorry and I promise it won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t.”

Mr. Bouchard steps aside and Michael is free to leave. It’s not until he gets home that he realizes his lockpicks are missing. And that was his second best set, too.

 

The last place where Michael isn’t supposed to be is a place where he’s told to be. At first he thinks it’s _exactly_ where he’s supposed to be, just another field expedition. He’s not entirely clear on why they need to personally go to the Arctic Ocean to investigate a strange phenomenon on a remote island, but it’s also not his job to know these things. Gertrude obviously wouldn’t go somewhere so cold for no reason—oh, but he’s worried about her. She doesn’t have much fat on her, and his grandmother always complained of terrible aches in the winter whenever the heater broke. Michael would have to draw her hot baths and heat up hot water bottles and occasionally massage her feet if they lost feeling. He’s not sure if Gertrude would ask him to do that even if she really needed it, which is one worrying thing. Another is that apparently it’s a bit of a hike once they get to the island, and they’ve got to wear these heavy coats and bring equipment and all.

The flight is in two parts: one from London to Moscow, and one from Moscow to a tiny port town he keeps forgetting the name of, which takes even longer in a large and nearly empty plane. He spends most of the first flight trying to restrain himself from talking to Gertrude, who clearly just wants to take a nap. But he can only do the crossword in the magazine so many times, and his iPod runs out of battery an hour into the second flight and he has to take himself off to the back of the plane so he won’t wake her up when he can’t stop jiggling his leg.

The one really bad thing is that he can’t bring any pot on research trips because _Gertrude will know_ , and it’s kind of what he uses when he needs to be less jumpy and bored. AKA the perfect thing for a trip that is going to take four full days each way of just travelling. Not that you can smoke on airplanes anyway.

He practically leaps out of the plane when they touch down on the one tiny air strip in wherever it is they are to start unloading everything from the plane. Gertrude follows more slowly and a lot more dignified and spends some time talking to the pilot until Michael has everything crammed into the back of a waiting truck and comes to ask what they’re doing next.

“Where have you put the portable radios?” she asks. He’s already sprinting back to the luggage. It takes a while because he keeps being wrong about where he put them, but eventually he does make it back to Gertrude. She’s just been standing around in the cold, in only one coat. Is he imagining that she’s shivering?

Her voice is perfectly steady, though, as she says, “Peter, we’ve touched down. Where are you precisely?”

To Michael’s surprise the voice that comes crackling back out is a normal northerner, not an actual Russian. “Glad to hear you made it all right. Follow the road south and then turn east at the shore, and you’ll find the pier. I’m sending a couple lads down to row you in as we speak. See you soon!”

He sounds like a lovely fellow. He’s sure to have all sorts of interesting stories about being a sea captain, and maybe he’ll let Michael help out around the ship. Michael is practically bouncing on the way to the pier, followed by the always sedate, the frustratingly dignified, Gertrude Robinson. Well, obviously her dignity is one of her best qualities, he’s always admired that about her.

The ship is… not as exciting as he was expecting. Most of the time he can’t even find anyone else. There are only a few sailors, and they do their jobs very quietly and efficiently. Not at all like the sailors in comics. Still, he asks how he can help, but they just give him stone-cold stares and tell him to go belowdecks if he wants to be warm. It’s kind of hard to argue with that, because he has never been colder in his life. He spends three days mostly huddled in his room alone and occasionally going down to the kitchen to get food for himself and Gertrude.

At sunset on the third day, Gertrude isn’t in her room. He finds her on the deck at the front of the ship, staring at the horizon. “I brought dinner,” he says. “It’s fish again, but I know you don’t mind fish. I asked what kind it was but it turns out I can’t actually pronounce…”

He trails off as Gertrude turns to look at him. Her eyes are even colder than the sailors, and even though she doesn’t say anything he feels like she’s told him to fuck off and die. He hugs the covered plate to his chest like its warmth can melt some of that ice before it stabs him. “Er, I’ll just, well, I’ll put it in your room, shall I? You—you know where to find me.” But he doesn’t quite manage to leave, even though his ears are starting to ache from the cold, he didn’t think he’d need a hat to be out on the deck for just a few minutes. “Where are… what’s the place we’re going?” he asks in a voice so quiet the wind seems to steal his words right out of his mouth. “Really?”

She seems to hear him anyway and turns just enough to answer. “Zemlya Sannikova. There is something evil there, and you are going to help me fight it.”

A small bubble of warmth swells up in his heart when she says _you are going to help me_. “It’s not a normal statement, then,” he whispers.

“No. I cannot say what it is. I can say that you will be very, very afraid. But you will need to walk forward anyway.”

“Of course,” he says. “If I can help.”

She gives him a weary, almost disappointed look, and he slinks back belowdecks.

The boat makes land that night while Michael is asleep, and first thing in the morning they row out, just the two of them, between huge floating chunks of ice. Since Michael is rowing he’s looking backward at the ship; he doesn’t see the island, and the warmth is like a physical blow when he crosses it. He stops rowing to twist around and see the impossible jungle, the green mountain looming over it. There’s a _castle_ on the mountain, or something like a castle—he can’t think about it too hard. Gertrude gives him a look and he turns reluctantly back around.

He drags the boat up the beach and they leave their coats inside. It’s too hot here. Like a paradise in the Arctic. Like a… Michael’s eyes are working too hard for his brain to be doing anything, as he follows Gertrude through the jungle. Neither of them is carrying anything, though. Whatever this fight against evil is, it’s not going to be fought with any weapon Michael understands. And like Gertrude said, he is afraid. He walks forward anyway, thinking about the awful ends he and Gertrude could meet. Thinking about how her eyes haven’t thawed with the rest of the ice, as if the steamy warmth of this island only made her colder. He actually asks if she can feel how warm it is, and she looks at him like he’s an idiot, which is probably a yes. He doesn’t manage to talk much as they make their way up the mountain toward what is presumably an evil castle.

When he walks out of the trees and finally sees the castle, that’s the exact moment he goes mad. Nothing is—is everything, _everything_ , in every direction. Every window in the castle is looking at him, even the ones he can’t see because they can’t see him, and there is only one thing in the whole world that is sure. The hand gripping his shoulder.

“Walk. Forward.”

He walks forward. He wishes he could remember how to shut his eyes, but it might not help at all because just the sound of that spiraling laughter that rises and rises forever without getting any higher, all on its own, would drive him mad. He can’t say how long they walk, only that he wishes it would end for every second. And then… it does. It ends at a door.

He finds a piece of paper in his hand. A map, Gertrude says.

“See you on the other side,” he says weakly, with his hand on the doorknob.

Her eyes tell him: _No. You won’t_. The door shuts behind him.

Still, for her, he walks.


End file.
